Politically Incorrect

Florentino Ariza, the lovelorn hero of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera,” gave the mysterious relationship between a book and its cover a new twist in a personal theory concerning the relationship “between a woman’s appearance and her aptitude for love.” Forget about the sensual types, the supermodels, the man-eaters. “The type he preferred was just the opposite: those skinny little tadpoles that no one bothered to turn around and look at in the street, who seemed to disappear when they took off their clothes, who made you feel sorry for them when their bones cracked at the first impact, and yet who could leave the man who bragged the most about his virility ready for the trashcan.”

Angela Argo, the eponymous jailbait of Francine Prose’s latest novel, “Blue Angel,” appears to be just such a tadpole. No vamp of a Marlene Dietrich angel, Angela is a sophomore at Euston College, a comico-pastoral third-rate institution of higher learning tucked into one of the more depressed corners of Vermont. In contemporary academia, no one would bother to turn around and look at Angela in the street, “a skinny, pale redhead with neon-orange and lime green streaks in her hair and a delicate, sharp-featured face pierced in a half-dozen places . . . a black leather motorcycle jacket and an arsenal of chains, dog collars, and bracelets.” But turn heads she does: one head in particular.

For 20 years, Ted Swenson has been writer-in-residence at Euston. Husband, father, author of “Phoenix Time,” an autobiographical novel of a teenage boy whose father immolates himself in protest against the Vietnam War, Ted is the sort of commonsensical, happy-go-lucky Jim of a professor you might expect to find in an ivy-covered novel by either one of the Amises. Swenson’s daughter might not be speaking to him, his priggish post-structuralist colleagues might be stiffing him and his latest novel-in-progress, “The Black and the Black” (a 20th century renovation of Stendhal featuring a downtown artist named Julius Sorley), might be gathering dust on a back corner of his desk.

But Swenson “has the good luck to be married to a woman who can work all day at a clinic and still have enough consciousness about the small pleasures of daily life to leave the tomatoes on the sill--just to make his salad. . . . Good wine, good food, dinner in a state of mild arousal. Swenson’s not a lunatic. The world is a vale of tears. He’s got nothing to complain about.”

Swenson’s one and only problem is that he’s a true artist, damned with the knowledge that his own art is played out and forced to admit that it is his student who has been blessed with the gift. For, within a class of students whose stories range from ghetto stereotypes to suburban sex with frozen chickens, Angela stands out. She is the real thing, a writer with a voice.

Section by section, in slow paragraphs and glimpses of chapters, Angela teases Swenson with a novel-in-progress about a teenage girl’s affair with her music teacher. What is a grown man to do? On the day after Thanksgiving, Swenson abandons his family and debarks for New York, where he desperately tries to sell Angela’s novel to his agent. After two decades of defusing student crushes, the teacher, for a brief, slippery moment, gives in to the tadpole.

*

This being late-Empire America, the plot takes a nanosecond to thicken. When the editor refuses to look at her manuscript, Angela files a sexual harassment suit against Swenson, producing tapes of their conversations that even Lucienne Goldberg might flinch from selling. Skinny redhead that she may be, this Blue Angela flattens her professor as effectively as Marlene Dietrich flattened hers. Faster than you can say “Torquemada,” Swenson’s career--never mind his virility--is ready for the trash can.

Yet what Prose performs at the end of “Blue Angel” is as neat a sleight of hand as has been seen in the libraries of university novels written in this century. More than just a comic diatribe against the excesses of sexual harassment policies, more than just a satire on those snake-oil dealers known as creative writing teachers (full disclosure: myself included) who perform “the weekly miracle of healing the terminally ill with minor cosmetic surgery,” “Blue Angel” becomes a full frontal attack on the pot-holed Elysian Fields of academe. Intentions--whether they be the good intentions of a zealous teacher or the bad intentions of a conniving student--no longer pave any roads. The intentions of people have become as irrelevant to our judgments of their behavior, Prose seems to say, as the intentions of authors have become to the interpretation of their novels. Appearance is all; what you see is what you get; the book and its cover are one and the same. A tadpole is a tadpole is a tadpole.

Which is not to say that our broken hero isn’t sorry. “He is extremely sorry for having spent twenty years of his one and only life, twenty years he will never get back, among people he can’t talk to, men and women to whom he can’t even tell the simple truth.” For it is the simple truth that is the chief victim of the modern university, whether it is a truth that is mangled by harassment committees, by tenure committees or merely by well-intentioned academics in search of publication. The search for truth in the time of correctness might make the most reasonable among us choleric.